Children’s mental time travel during mind wandering

Abstract

The prospective bias is a salient feature of mind wandering in healthy adults, yet little is known about the temporal focus of children’s mind wandering. In the present study, (I) we developed the temporal focus of mind wandering questionnaire for school-age children (TFMWQ-C), a 12-item scale with good test–retest reliability and construct validity. (II) The criterion validity was tested by thought sampling in both choice reaction time task and working memory task. A positive correlation was found between the temporal focus measured by the questionnaire and the one adopted during task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) by thought sampling probes, especially in the trait level of future-oriented mind wandering. At the same time, children who experienced more TUTs tended to show worse behavioral performance during tasks. (III) The children in both tasks experienced more future-oriented TUTs than past-oriented ones, which was congruent with the results observed in adults; however, in contrast with previous research on adults, the prospective bias was not influenced by task demands. Together these results indicate that the prospective bias of mind wandering has emerged since the school-age (9∼13 years old), and that the relationship between mental time travel (MTT) during mind wandering and the use of cognitive resources differs between children and adults. Our study provides new insights into how this interesting feature of mind wandering may adaptively contribute to the development of children’s MTT.

Changes in electrophysiological static and dynamic human brain functional architecture from childhood to late adulthood

“…68 ). As certain subtypes of spontaneous cognitive processes are detectable in time-varying functional connectivity measurements 68 , it could be hypothesized that part of our results might pertain to the age-related changes in the occurrence of mind wandering episodes and in the content/type of spontaneous cognitive processes observed from childhood to young adulthood and from young to late adulthood 63,[69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77] . Further studies should investigate this critical issue.…”

Spontaneous future cognition: the past, present and future of an emerging topic

“…Similar issues concerning the need for equating the difficulty of ongoing (vigilance) tasks in different age groups arise in relation to studying spontaneous future (and past) thoughts in children, and especially in very young children who may also have difficulties in meta-awareness or noticing and reporting spontaneous thoughts-more so than older adults (e.g., see Chen, 2013, cited in Ye, Song, Zhang, & Wang, 2014. Because of these difficulties, there are currently less than a handful studies on mind-wandering in older children and adolescents (e.g., Ye et al, 2014;Van den Driessche et al, 2017;Stawarczyk et al, 2014;Zhang, Song, Ye, & Wang, 2013), with virtually no developmental studies on children's spontaneous future thinking. The studies reported by McCormack et al and Caza and Atance in this issue are therefore starting to fill this gap in the literature by developing and testing new methods that have resulted in important new insights on children's spontaneous future thinking ability and its relationship with its voluntary counterpart.…”

Validation of the Chinese version of the Mind-Wandering Questionnaire (MWQ) and the mediating role of self-esteem in the relationship between mind-wandering and life satisfaction for adolescents

“…Moreover, few studies have examined mind-wandering among Chinese (some examples include Song & Wang, 2012;Ye, Song, Zhang, & Wang, 2014). Specifically, Song and Wang (2012) used the experience-sampling method to collect mind-wandering experiences among Chinese undergraduates and Ye et al (2014) investigated the temporal focus of mind-wandering in a pupil's sample.…”

“…Specifically, Song and Wang (2012) used the experience-sampling method to collect mind-wandering experiences among Chinese undergraduates and Ye et al (2014) investigated the temporal focus of mind-wandering in a pupil's sample. Therefore, an appropriate Chinese scale does not exist to measure the trait levels of mind-wandering among adolescents.…”